When my oldest son was three, the
Disney Cars movie had recently come out and the die-cast Cars characters were
all the rage. Ben had only recently
potty trained, in his case entirely motivated by the reward of a new Hot Wheel
every time he completed a line on his potty sticker chart. He had loved cars and trucks and all things
wheeled for quite a while. We already
had an extensive collection of little metal vehicles, and I was hesitant at
first to jump on the Disney Cars bandwagon.
He was only my second child, and I still clung to some new-parent ideals
of avoiding commercialization of toys.
But as any parent knows, your children will manage to collect those
little commercialized toys whether you buy them or not.
To my surprise, as his collection
grew I found myself getting into the excitement of it as well. I found joy in watching Ben spend hours
carefully lining all of his cars up in perfect order. Our family room rug became a race track. He called them “Eye Cars” (since unlike Hot
Wheels, they have eyes on their windshields).
He knew them all by name, and soon I did, too. The months before Christmas that year found me
delighting every time I found a Car we didn’t have hanging on a store shelf or featured
on an Amazon page. Soon there was a
small but deliberate stash of Cars waiting to make his collection more complete
on a near December morning. I was
invested. The Cars had become family.
And so it felt far too soon when he
went off to kindergarten and came home with the pronouncement that he now loved
Star Wars. Star Wars? I consider myself a fan too, but then I have actually
seen the movies. But Ben? He has no Star Wars books or movies. He’s never even seen a Star Wars cartoon. How could he suddenly “love” Star Wars? And yet he did. Almost as though a latent gene had been
activated upon him turning 5-and-a-half, there it was. And it didn’t matter what he lacked in
knowledge. He came home from school with
drawing after drawing of characters whose names he had learned from his
friends. They fought each other with
slingshots, because he had not yet discovered light sabers. And the Cars began to be cast aside, replaced
by Star Wars LEGOs and action figures. And while I had enjoyed the original trilogy and
suffered through the second trilogy, I was never one who could name every
planet or more than the handful of main characters. The parts of my brain that had expanded to
welcome the entire Radiator Springs community into memory somehow could not
grasp the difference between a clone trooper and a storm trooper. I couldn’t share in this world. And my heart broke a little.
However, we added two more boys to
the family, and I had hopes of reliving the little boy years all over
again. That’s what I thought would
happen. But it turns out that once you
have gone through those years the first time, they don’t quite repeat with the
younger children. Those transitions are
commandeered by their older mentors. When
Ben was into Star Wars, Andrew was two years old, and then turning three. With big brother as his hero, he barely
glanced at the Cars that were collecting dust in the corners. His Star Wars collection grew along with Ben’s. They turned everything they could find into
light sabers to battle with. Andrew’s
drawings never mistakenly featured slingshots.
At three, Andrew was already turning six.
Cars gave way to Star Wars. Star Wars turned to Mario and Mario became Ninjago.
And then one day Ben was invited to a Pokémon-themed birthday party. While I at least get the main points of Star
Wars, Pokémon has never been part of my knowledge base. I have now seen multiple episodes of Pokémon
cartoons, and still I am unable to make even the slightest sense of this world. After asking the boys for explanations over
and over, I have finally memorized the following phrase: “Pokémon are mythical creatures with elemental
powers who battle each other.” And I
probably have that phrase wrong, too. The
only one I can name is Pikachu, since he loudly graces my son’s T-shirt. Ben and Andrew live in this reality without
me now. And I refrain from pointing out
that their entire Pokémon collections that they spend every dime they have on
are, in fact, just pieces of paper with drawings of pretend animals on
them. It wouldn’t help. They would just roll their eyes at my
inability to distinguish been a DX and an EX, which to me are the names of models
of the Honda Civic we own. So I stay out
of those discussions and instead play spaceships and rockets with Will, my
current three-year-old who is obsessed with vehicles of all kinds. He doesn’t know any of the Cars names, but I could
still hold out hope that he might soon.
That hope did not last long. The other day while I was making dinner, Ben
gave Will three of his apparently unimportant Pokémon cards. He told his brother to take good care of
them, and that if he does he will get more cards. Will came running over holding the cards with
such delight! “Look Mom, Ben gave me Pokémons!” My insides wrenched a little as I
congratulated him and attempted to share in his joy. He is only three, and the odds that he will
take care of these paper cards for long are not good. And this held true over the next few days, as
they were left in various parts of the house and he only occasionally thought
to look for them. I nearly breathed a
sigh of relief. Until this morning, when
he came running out holding his still well-kept cards and rattling off the
names of each Pokémon character that they represented. Even I can see now that the battle has been
lost.
The truth is my days of enjoying a
preschool boy were left behind with Ben.
It turns out that there really are no do-overs in parenting, even if you
add more children. Whatever age the
oldest turns, that is effectively the age that all of my boys will be. Never again will I have a three-year-old, but
this year I will have three 9-year-olds.
And it’s a little sad to me, that I will never share in their little preschool
world again. But instead I look to the
new joys. The joy of watching Ben share
his latest love with his littlest brother, and even attempting to throw in a
lesson on responsibility in the process.
The joy of watching Andrew work to catch up with or even bypass Ben in
all of the interests they share. The joy
of watching Will, eyes wide with wonder that Ben has entrusted him with something
so precious. Nowhere in those joys does it
matter whether the subject is Lightning McQueen or Pikachu. In that small fact, hope remains.
